WHAT IS A MARKETING PERSONA?

A marketing persona (or buyer persona) is a semi-fictional character profile of your ideal customer. Based off of market research and real data — a marketing persona helps you to better understand your audience. These character profiles will guide you and tell you how to market your products to people that fall within that character’s demographic.

Every business big or small, should know to whom they are talking to with every piece of marketing material they produce — a great way of doing this is with marketing personas.

Why Do I Need a Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas provide fantastic structure and insights for your company. As you begin to create one it forces you to think like the character and helps guide the way you market to that demographic as HubSpot states, “A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organisation.

As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.”

How Do You Create a Persona?

Don’t just stop at creating one profile, ideally each business should have around 3-5 characters that represents your customer base. Follow these 5 steps to create the perfect buyer persona for your business:

1. Character Demographics.

Include details such as age, gender, job title, income, relationship status, education and location. Most importantly, give the character a name!
There are plenty of free government resources to find the average income for people working in specific jobs, use this information to decide how much they earn based off of their experience and expertise.

2. Identify Your Persona’s Goals & Challenges.

What do they do in their jobs? What are they responsible for? What does success look like in their role? Do they own their own business? If so, what is their primary goal for the year/ two years? What challenges do they face in their job position or business?

3. What Are the Fears, Wants, & Values?

Put yourself into your character’s shoes (or, even better, conduct market research on that specific demographic).

Identify your character’s reservations about buying your product or service. For example, say you are an online clothing retailer, your buyer persona may ask “will this item fit me”. This is the “fear” element. It is then down to the way you market your product on your website to ease their fears, provide sizing charts, diagrams or, as Icebreaker do, a quick multiple choice quiz to identify the perfect size guide.

Wants are self explanatory, it’s what they want or expect from your product.

A character’s values can play a pivotal role in your marketing material and can help you identify your unique selling points (USPs). Does your demographic value sustainability and environmentally aware businesses? Do they actively look for products that look to change the world? Do they prioritise a work / life balance? Are they social? Do they prioritise keeping fit and healthy?

4. Communication Channels.

This element of the buyer persona profile is of great importance. This segment will help you understand how to reach your customers in their day-to-day lives and will go a long way in guiding your marketing efforts.

Identify your demographics preferred communication:

• How do they learn about new information at work?
• How do they get their news?
• What publications do they read in their personal life and work life, if at all?
• What social media channels are they on?
• What organisations/clubs do they belong to?

5. What do they know?

Your business may need specific information. A website development company will need different information to a medical company, for example. Consider industry specific information such as:

• Computer literacy
• Vehicle they drive / primary mode of transport
• Hobbies

Put It into Action

Now that you’ve created your marketing personas, it’s time to put everything that you’ve learnt into action! You should be able to say “this radio ad is aimed at the Jills of this world”, “this blog is targeted to all the Steves out there”, and so on.

Every piece of marketing material you put out there has to be aimed at certain personas. The next step is to make sure everyone is aware of them!
Creating personas is important to developing a marketing plan that appeals to your target market. Gathering accurate information and creating buyer profiles will allow you to target the right people, build an appealing website, and overall marketing material that will help to increase your ROI.

If you want to take your business to the next level contact the experts at Quentosity. Our digital marketing techniques can target your specific buyer demographics and implement a marketing strategy that will increase your profitability.

Our partnership with HubSpot and our focus on the lead generation process sets us apart from other digital marketing agencies and we ensure your hard-won leads won’t slip through the cracks.

Quentosity is a digital marketing agency that can generate business for your business. Whether you’re based in Tauranga, Auckland, Hamilton or Christchurch — we can grow your business.

If you want to discover what we can do for you, drop us an email or phone us to arrange a casual coffee and a chat at our beachside Papamoa office.